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Trust Is a Police Officer’s Greatest Protection

Seth Stoughton is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where he is affiliated with the Rule of Law Collaborative. He served as a city police officer and state investigator and was recently a Climenko fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. He is on Twitter.

Updated April 8, 2015, 4:43 PM

As a rookie police officer, I was given a pair of handcuffs to detain people, chemical spray and a baton to physically enforce my commands and a gun that I could have used to kill someone.

But most important was the badge I was given, signifying the ultimate source of my authority: the trust of the community I served.

Police are given tremendous discretion and responsibility. Our legal system must ensure that they exercise their authority appropriately.

The same is true of every law enforcement officer in the country. Society vests the men and women in uniform with a tremendous discretion and responsibility. Our legal system has the obligation to ensure that they exercise their authority appropriately. Police officers wield enormous authority, and we should hold them to a correspondingly high standard.

Unfortunately, our legal system often falls short. When a police officer is accused of malfeasance, a bevy of legal protections make it difficult to thoroughly investigate misconduct, effectively prosecute criminal activity or successfully pursue civil claims. Further, there are institutional obstacles to police accountability; many agencies investigate accusations against officers entirely in-house, for example, and local prosecutors can be extremely reluctant to bring charges against police officers.

In the context of police shootings, these obstacles are particularly disturbing. Many — even most — police shootings are justified. But there are those that are not. All too often, legal and systemic obstacles make it difficult to determine which is which. The result is distrust. The public distrusts the police and the process that claims to regulate them. The police distrust the public. That distrust eats away at the bond between police agencies and the communities they serve, reducing the legitimacy that officers ultimately depend on.

How can we heal the divide between the police and the public, a divide that all too often falls along racial lines? There is no simple answer, no quick solution. We could start by subjecting police actions, including the use of lethal force, to meaningful external and independent review. Officers would resent that change, at least at first, but that has been true of every major police reform. But as we’ve seen with those other reforms, officers would eventually accept and even promote that change as a symbol of their professionalism.

Society should give our officers the tools they need to do their jobs, but society also needs to ensure that they’re doing those jobs the right way. That’s what professionalism is all about.